Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Mar 31, 2017

To fully function at its best potential, AI needs to learn "on the job", and not in a simulated environment. So everyone willing to use AI will have to live with a weaker product in the beginning, and will have to try and make it as smart as possible before launching it. Interesting read about this challenge:

We are used to tag stuff. Even texts, in order to make them searchable or be able to quickly put together compilations. That might be a thing of the past as AI evolves and object recognition gets better and better. Google unveiled a search recently that is able to determine objects in videos. And in November 2015, the open-sourced tensor flow, their machine learning project, which is now used in Google Photos to recognize objects. Soon, tagging might be over.

When everyone goes agile and instead of research just throws products out there and sees how they are doing, who ensures consistency? And why would consistency be a success factor? Short and interesting (older, Jan 2017) piece on Havard Business review around this topic.

Nice Overview on Wired about how Sports is one major topic on Instagram. The article has a few interesting numbers in it, for example that House of Highlights, owned by Bleacher report, has a (stunning) interaction rate of 2,43% on Instagram.

Mar 10, 2017

Apparently taken from a McKinsey report, this article on medium lists 12 industries and evaluates how much which area within those will be impacted by automation and artificial intelligence. AI is always scary and fascinating at the same time, and you cannot begin to imagine how many "human jobs" will be obsolete when all this happens. On the other hand, everything will be more effective, cheaper, accurate and powerful. The article offers no interpretation, just a list of business areas and how they may change. Still a great resource:

A genious human has an IQ of about 200. Softbank Robotics CEO Masayoshi Son predicts that by 2047, in 30 years, a computer might have an IQ of 10.000. Which means they will decide and do things that humans are completely incapable of understanding.

A year ago I started giving talks about Messengers, and halfway through I had a chapter called "the WeChat-ification of Facebook Messenger". That was not based on the monopolization of mobile user attention, which is very much the case in China with WeChat, but on Facebook's move to make Messenger a platform on which 3rd party applications (bots etc.) can be built, distributed, conducted that may even threaten the app economy as such. This TechCrunch article lays out the recent developments on Messenger and how this could be the next big platform:

35 min talk in the United Arab Emirates with Elon Musk. At 8:35 he starts talking about AI and autonomous cars, predicted that in 10 years from now the vast majority of newly built cars would be driving autonomously. At 10:00 he classifies this as "narrow AI", while the real opportunity - but also threat - will be "general artificial intelligence" which he sees developing like super intelligent aliens. If you don't have time and want to be scared a bit - start at minute 20.

We are seeing many publishers experimenting with Facebook live, and Facebook recently announced they would introduce video ad breaks in live and on-demand video, fed by the Audience Network. While this type of monetization is important for (automated) scale, I keep thinking that branded content and sponsoring is a great way for publishers to monetize their social media presences. Perform's Goal.com is running a "TV-like" show that monetizes on the integration of brands, and some insights are shared here:

Very good article from TechRepublic about how the NFL uses in-stadium WiFi and apps. Super Bowl 50 saw 10.1 terabytes of data flow through the Levi's stadium's WiFi (63% increase to Super Bowl 49). Team apps feature in-stadium sections with the ability to order food&beverages to your seat, which obviously increases turnover, merchandising discounts and info on waiting lines for restrooms. The Patriots' app is used by 18-22k people each gameday - with 66000 in attendance. More great stats and info:

Nice presentation from Online Marketing Rockstars and the relation of German internet companies to GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and other global players. The link features both the talk (video) and a slideshare.